fifteeneightyfour
RSSAcademic Perspectives from Cambridge University Press.
Ruling Children: Boy Kings in Medieval Europe
The succession of a child king was a relatively common occurrence across medieval Europe, but kingship is still usually studied from an adult-focused perspective which sees boy rulers as paradoxes or unimportant pawns. Royal Childhood and Child Kingship s…
Democracy: ‘the line of truth and utility’
There is no doubt that liberal democracy as being currently practiced in the west, despite serious problems, is superior beyond comparison to many authoritarian or totalitarian autocracies. The latter can indeed produce impressive results which the former…
World Crime Fiction
At the end of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Edgar Allan Poe’s detective Auguste Dupin, the prototype of the analytical detective, offers a disparaging verdict on the Parisian Prefect of Police. The Prefect has “impaired his visi…
Understanding Human Metabolism: Carbohydrates, the bread of life
Keith Frayn, author of Understanding Human Metabolism address some of the major misconceptions about human metabolism.
The Age of the Gas Mask
We are living in a global age of masks. The face coverings that many of us have worn since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic range from medical-grade PPE to handsewn cloth to expensive designer-branded fabric. Masks went from being hard to find…
The Politics of Policing in Latin America
Forty years after the end of authoritarianism, many Latin American democracies exhibit high levels of state violence, primarily attributable to the agency most directly responsible for preserving the state’s monopoly of legitimate coercion: the poli…
The minds of our nearest kin
Recently, I was in Wauchula, Florida, at the Center for Great Apes, which is a sanctuary for chimpanzees and orangutans.
Revising Spatial Frames in East African History
In On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, c.1830-1890, I seek to challenge how East African history is conceived in space. I do so in two core ways. First, I take the region around Lake Tanganyika as a case study. This f…
Not just another book about the Second World War
In Britain there is no shortage of academic scholarship, novels, television shows and films about the Second World War. It is a topic that plays a central role in secondary history education. It is a period that pops up at regular intervals in political d…
Why do non-State armed groups detain?
In January 2020, the UN International Commission of Inquiry on Syria issued a report detailing the activities of the different parties to the conflict(s), including non-State armed groups (NSAGs). The Commission affirmed that detentions by NSAGs were docu…
Cambridge Core
RSSAdvancing learning, knowledge and research.
Defining intercultural competence: going far beyond the ‘do’s and don’ts’.
To understand something, it’s sometimes easier to understand what it’s not. In this blog, expert Kasia Lanucha shares why intercultural competence is much deeper than simply understanding cultural customs.
A Q&A with the course leader of Climate Change for Decision-Makers: Challenges, Transformations, Strategies
Professor Jorge Vinuales holds the Harold Samuel Chair of Law and Environmental Policy at the University of Cambridge, where he founded the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Governance (C-EENRG).…
The Evolution of Specialised Minds
Evolutionary theory has long been used to explain species and sex differences, but individual differences in cognition and behaviour have mostly been left out of the picture.
Reflections on 26 Years with International Legal Materials
It seems like only yesterday that Domingo Acevedo, my colleague at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asked me whether I would be interested in serving on the Editorial Advisory Committee of International Legal Materials (ILM) since he was rota…
La Guarjira in Colombia between paradoxes of ancestral care and exploitation
La Guajira: Natural wealth vs exploitation As a Guajira woman, feminist and social researcher, I want to share some personal reflections from the vision of female leadership as caretakers of the land and the fight against different forms of coloniz…
A practical design approach for a single-stage sounding rocket to reach a target altitude
More than 99% of air molecules on Earth exist below 50km altitude and therefore, there is certainly an upper limit on altitude for an aircraft to reach, while there is a lower limit on an orbit for a spacecraft to operate, as even a low density of air cau…
GLJ Special Issue on New Private Law Theory
Do you like books? So do we. And do you like book reviews? Same here. But why does the German Law Journal hardly publish book reviews?The…
Expanding your summer law reading list
This small and compact 5th issue of the German Law Journal reaches you from a sunny office but can be consumed at the beach, in the mountains or anywhere else you are travelling this year, whether physically or not.In…
Cambridge to publish a new flagship journal in the fast-growing field of Pakistan studies
Critical Pakistan Studies will be the first international journal devoted to the study of Pakistan and its peopleJournal will be interdisciplinary and open accessAims to give the widest possible understanding of Pakistan, past, and present Cambridge Un…
Anti-Constitutional Populism
On 3 April 2022, Victor Orbán won his fourth straight election victory in Hungary. On 9 May, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, the son of a former dictator of the Philippines followed President Duterte, with Duterte’s daughter as Vi…
“I think my enemy”: Carl Schmitt, sick of reading Arendt
Carl Schmitt, “the famous professor of constitutional and international law who later became a Nazi” (as Hannah Arendt once put it), continues to shock and intrigue, to convince and exasperate.…
Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas
For more than 40 years, the Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBA) programme of BirdLife International has aimed to identify, document, safeguard, manage and monitor a network of sites of international significance for birds. The global list now exte…
